Just to Microsoft, the open-source community is ready to send you to your grave. You
That is what I would say. If I lived with Linus Wallace, the third over here in fantasy land, where any of that was true so far, the one-month Lennox gaming challenge has been as advertised a challenge. And in part two, Luke and I are going to be taking it to the next level by not just gaming on Linux, but by recording and streaming our gameplay to viewers on Twitch. Now I'd be lying. If I said I'm not expecting some speed bumps like this small one here to tell you about our sponsor.
With our desktop environment set up, Luke and I have a deceptively short pre-flight checklist of tasks to complete, to be streaming ready. We'll need comms to chat and collaborate with our fellow creators and software. That's capable of capturing our gameplay audio and face cams. And obviously, we'll need the affirmation to audio interfaces and cameras. Both. We both use El Gato key lights, which we've always controlled using windows software. So we'll both need to find a workaround for that.
We'll be awarded for having an ugly or bad-sounding stream. It's got to look every bit as legit from a viewer's perspective as it did on Immediately. I started overthinking things. Sometimes that's the problem with knowing just enough to be dangerous. I tried to apt-get OBS the industry standard for desktop capture and streaming in the terminal only to discover that men Jaro the Linux distribution that I'm using. Doesn't come with an apt because the apt is for managing packages on Devean and related OSS. Oops, making life more difficult, the message that comes up when you try to execute the command, doesn't say, Hey, you should probably be using Pac-Man yet dumps. It tries to install some kind of dependency for apt. Then just quietly fails and prompts you to do the same thing again, when you try to use its infinite loop, baby. Speaking of which I had a panic moment when I checked OBS compatibility and found out that it is unsupported in art by the way, and its derivatives. But the good news is that upon launch, I was immediately relieved to find that it works exactly as expected with some exceptions.
For example, the end vanc new and coder doesn't show up as an option, which appears to be down to NVIDIA's poop, drivers on Linux side note here, I always kind of assumed that the Linux community was grossing about Nvidia, primarily for their locks down proprietary approach to things and that it had less to do with the actual quality of the product. Now, I properly understand that it is both as mentioned core product functionality from like a couple of years ago is missing the control panel looks like it's from 10 years ago and the interface is kind of confusing. Thankfully, I was able to enable G sync on my display, but for whatever reason, you allow it to turn it on, which you then verify in a completely different tab. And this kind of confusion is not a deal-breaker. It's just obvious that the Linux software has never gotten the kind of TLC from the UX team that the windows software does
For me, acquiring OBS was no problem. I just got it from the package manager and it was all okay. Once installed though, we noticed something window capture on Linux can be a little problematic. We couldn't seem to get it working at all at the start. I had an option for it, but it didn't work. And Linus didn't even have that. But a few days later I tried it again for a different project and it worked just fine. I checked in with Linus and he did too. Neither of us knows what might've fixed it, but that's cool. I guess,
Yes. The bigger issue for me ended up being the software that just doesn't exist. There are third-party tools. For example, that allow key remapping keyboarding master is evidently a popular one, but if your peripherals have a manufacturer-provided tool that is used to reconfigure RGB lighting or the liftoff distance of your mouse, or the sensitivity steps of your DPI button, then get ready to install windows in a virtual machine, pass those devices through, configure them, and then hand them back over to Linux. It's extremely tedious and doesn't even remotely restore full functionality. For example, don't expect to get a low battery warning for your G pro wireless mouse, and it's even worse for my audio interface. The go XLR has a handful of unique features, including decent preamps reprogrammable screen labels, a built-in soundboard function, and the infamous beep button that I am so fond of using during my live streams about the kind of bullets that Nvidia puts them through.
I'll have it in the affiliate link down below, by the way, the bad news about it is that as far as I can tell TC Helicon has given exactly zero thought to Linux whatsoever, but wait, there's a solution. All I have to do is follow these simple instructions to download a random script off, get the hub and run it with no indication given whatsoever for how exactly to run a script. Even the process of downloading it was unintuitive. And I know get hub is for developers and not for end-users, but it's really hard to hide behind that shield when it took me less than two days to run into a situation where I had to use it. I mean, at that point, if get hub is only for developers, then desktop Linux is only for developers. You can't have it both ways. Unlike on LTT store, where you can find great merchant fair prices.
Our mouse mats are rated five stars with literally thousands of reviews. Go see what all the fuss is about at the link below. Anyway, I found a guide on how to run a script. I'm grateful for that, but I'm frustrated by the condescending tone. I mean, my assumption that a file with a.sh extension would behave as I would expect it to and launching some kind of script running application doesn't seem that unreasonable newsflash random contributor, you can also change a file extension in windows and it will attempt to launch in the default program for that file type. It serves the same fundamental purpose hinting at the contents of the file. The only difference is that these hints for the user are also used as hints for the operating system. It's a lot more convenient than digging into the properties of the file to find out what it does.
Anyway, pompous tone aside that contributor did help me figure out my get hub download. So it turns out that right-click save target gets you an HTML file in. sh clothing because I don't know some borderline arbitrary reason probably. And to get it to be actual.sh file, I had to copy it into a text editor, Kate, and then save that as a script and execute it in the terminal. It spat a bunch of errors. And as I expected, most of the buttons don't work, but all of the inputs and outputs that I had already configured in windows did show up in my fader's work. I even have my button until my go XLR loses power for any reason, at which point I will have to pass it through to windows, reconfigure it in windows, and then pass it back over to Linux without losing power, compared to that, all the other stuff is minor.
The most notable issue I had was that my audio devices were just kind of screwy in ops. My voice came across a very unnaturally deep, and it sounded like my mic input have been duplicated. My voice just feels deeper. Now. I don't know if I've got some lodged or what. And Chad was pretty convinced that I had set something up incorrectly. And if I was a viewer of my stream, I probably would have said the same thing, but I've been using OBS for like six or seven years now. So I had my doubts. I even streamed my OBS settings panel to prove it but eventually felt out of options. I just restarted OBS and yeah, that solved pretty much everything, which was kind of frustrating because I've heard time and time again that you don't have to turn things off and on again to get them working in Linux. But Hey, maybe that's just cause I'm not great at Linux yet. Perhaps there’s a commodity differently I could have done. Not sure on the good side of things though. My mixer has worked flawlessly from the start, but it is pretty simple. As far as mixers go. I didn't have to change any settings. I didn't have to install anything for it. I just set it as my default input device and was good to go.
Once I got Tom Mack figured out getting comms going was surprisingly simple. The pack is a program with a graphical interface that functions similarly to the Pac-Man package manager that you operate in the terminal. At least it does. Once you find the hidden button in a panic to search snap flat pack and art's user repository entries, it's basically like the pop shop from Populus, except it didn't try to break my system. The first time I used it, the only really difficult thing was choosing the right package to install for discord there's regular discord. And then there's Canary discord, whatever that is. I chose the most official-looking package and I was up and running almost immediately. Once I found the super convenient per-application volume mixer in the bottom right corner, the interface is kind of kludgy like scrolling with your mouse wheel scrolls through both the audio devices and the levels of the individual devices, which is not great. But other than that, it works well. And my first voice call to Luke went completely without a hitch, or it would have if I'd known that it was starting. Unfortunately, I still have not figured out how to get desktop notifications working. I found a guide, but the instructions fell apart almost immediately. When my discord package didn't show up in the list where it's supposed to be for me to fix it. I suppose that’s presumably a design for another day.
Discord was an easy install for me. Again, it was just automatically available in the package manager. That being said there were certain missing features. Screen-sharing across slack teams and discord are kind of sketchy at best. They feel less stable or they're even missing some features here or there. Outside of that, there's even really simple stuff missing now and then, like if I download a file in slack and then try to click the open containing folder button, just nothing happens. And speaking of missing features, I use the phone app for the El Gato control center, just like Linus did. I had found another solution through a script on getting hub, but I thought that way would potentially be problematic in the long term. So I just avoided it, unfortunately for my carer. However, Canon EOS utilities don't work on Linux. I'd been using that software on windows for quite a while now to get a live feed from my Canon 70 D over USB to my computer, it was flawless and didn't require a capture card. I do have an Avio 4k capture card, which does work on Linux, but I don't have the micro HD, my cable that it would need to connect to my camera. I could pick one up, but just for this challenge, I decided to go with my old Logitech C nine 20, which while it doesn't remotely look as good, works just fine. And when you make the window for it small, no one can tell.
I think overall the easiest part for me was getting my cabling 4k up and running. It was garbled when I selected one of the duplicate sources in OBS, but immediately after trying the second Glenn, it cleared up and has been picture perfect ever since. So it works, but there's a much larger upfront investment in getting it working. The question is just whether it feels worth it
And it worked if you connect it to the stream after we were done about 15 minutes of troubleshooting while we were just in the thick of trying not to starve, I'm sure any random viewer wouldn't have been able to tell a difference between one of my old windows streams and this one audio was good. The capture was good. That's where the good ends. However, everything I used past this point was a lesser experience compared to its Windows counterpart. Almost everything was missing at least one feature. And some I'd say most notably OBS and teams were just buggies requiring restarts for simple settings to apply and had other various problems. It wasn't impossible and it was easier than I expected, but due to various bugs, missing features, and incompatible software, it wasn't as simple or clean as doing it on windows. I wouldn't say that was enough for it to be a deal-breaker
For me. The bottom line is what you're looking to get out of it. If your daily driving Linux for game streaming out of a genuine passion for learning more about it, then have at it, have fun, but just know what you're getting into PC gaming already requires a certain amount of tinkering. I mean, there's a reason that more people game on consoles, you know, whether it's trying to track down, save files in some Vista era folder, or forcing an aspect ratio in an INI file, but a Linux gaming PC, it requires all of that crap. And then another mountain of crap on top of it. Like when something doesn't work, you can tell yourself, you know, well, I never wanted to use that functionality or I never wanted to play that game anyway, but honestly, it just comes across as sour grapes. It is not that easy to use.